Enchanted Pilgrimage (24 page)

“Thing is,” said Hal, “there's been too much happening. There has been so much strangeness that we have become numbed to it. You finally get to a point where you suspend all wonder and begin accepting the unusual as if it were everyday. Back there in the world we came from all of us lived quite ordinary lives. Day followed day without anything unusual happening at all, and we were satisfied that nothing ever happened. We were accustomed to nothing ever happening. On this trip we have become so accustomed to strangenesses that we no longer find them too remarkable. We do not question them. Maybe because we haven't the time to question.”

“I have been doing a lot of wondering about the wheels,” said Cornwall, “and I'm inclined to agree with Sniveley that their target was either the Chaos Beast or Bucket. More likely the Chaos Beast, it seems to me, for they probably did not know, or those who sent them, did not know the Chaos Beast was dead. It would seem unlikely they would have known of Bucket.”

“They could have,” Sniveley objected. “Somehow they could have been able to calculate the time, if they knew about the Beast, when Bucket was about to hatch.”

“Which brings us to the question,” said Cornwall, “not only of what the wheels were, but what was the Chaos Beast, and what is Bucket? Is Bucket another Chaos Beast?”

“We don't know what the Chaos Beast looked like,” said Gib. “Maybe Bucket is a young Chaos Beast and will change when he gets older.”

“Perhaps.” said Cornwall. “There is a man at Oxford, a very famous savant, who just recently announced that he had worked out the method by which, through some strange metamorphosis, a worm turns into a butterfly. It is unlikely, of course, that he is right. Most of his fellow savants do not agree with him. He has been the butt of much ridicule because of his announcement. But I suppose he could be right. There are many strange occurrences we do not understand. Maybe his principle is right, and it may be that Bucket is the worm that in time will metamorphose into a Chaos Beast.”

“I wish,” said Mary, “that you wouldn't talk that way in front of Bucket. As if he were just a thing and not a creature like the rest of us. Just a thing to talk about. He might be able to hear, he might understand what you are saying. If that is so, you must embarrass him.”

“Look at Coon,” said Oliver. “He is stalking Bucket.”

Hal half rose from his sitting position, but Cornwall reached out and grabbed him by the arm. “Watch,” he said.

“But Coon …”

“It's all right,” said Cornwall. “It's a game they're playing.”

The end of one of Bucket's arms had dropped onto the ground, was lying there, the tip of it quivering just a little. It was the quivering tip of the tentacle that Coon was stalking, not Bucket himself. Coon made a sudden rush; the arm tip, at the last moment, flicked out of his reach. Coon checked his rush and pivoted, reaching out with one forepaw, grasping at the tentacle. His paw closed about it and he went over on his back, grabbing with the second forepaw, wrestling the tentacle. Another tentacle extruded and tickled Coon's rump. Coon released his hold on the first tentacle, somersaulted to grab at the second one.

“Why, Bucket's playing with him,” Mary gasped. “Just like you'd use a string to play with a kitten. He even let him catch the tentacle.”

Hal sat down heavily. “Well, I'll be damned,” he said.

“Bucket's human, after all,” said Mary.

“Not human,” said Cornwall. “A thing like that never could be human. But he has a response to the play instinct, and that does make him seem just a little human.”

“Supper's ready,” Mary said. “Eat up. We have breakfast left and that is all.”

Coon and Bucket went on playing.

33

Tomorrow, Cornwall thought, they'd go on toward the mountains, where they'd seek out, or try to seek out, the Old Ones. And after they had found the Old Ones, or had failed to find them, what would they do then? Surely they would not want to turn about and come back across the Blasted Plain, without horses and more than likely with Hellhounds in wait for their return. One could not be sure, he knew, that the Hellhounds would be waiting, but the possibility that they might be was not something that could be ignored.

He sat on a sandy slope of ground that ran down to the stream, leaning back against a boulder. Off to his left the campfire gleamed through the dark, and he could see the silhouettes of the rest of the party sitting around it. He hoped that for a while they would not miss him and come looking for him. For some reason that he could not completely understand, he'd wanted to be off by himself. To think, perhaps, although he realized that the time for thinking was past. The thinking should have been done much earlier, before they had gone plunging off on this incredible adventure. If there had been some thought put to it, he knew, they might not have set out on it. It had all been done on the impulse of the moment. He had fled the university once he learned that his filching the page of manuscript was known. Although, come to think of it, there had been no real need to flee. There were a hundred places on the campus or in the town where he could have holed up and hidden out. The imagined need to flee had been no more than an excuse to go off on a hunt to find the Old Ones. And from that point onward the expedition had grown by a chain of unlikely circumstances and by the same emotional response to them as he, himself, had experienced—responses that were illogical on the face of them. An unknowing fleeing perhaps, from the sameness of the ordinary life that Oliver and Hal had talked about just a few hours before.

At the sound of a soft rustling behind him, he leaped to his feet. It was Mary.

“I wondered where you were,” she said. “I came looking for you. I hope you don't mind.”

“I've been saving a place for you,” he said. He reached out a hand to guide her to a seat against the boulder, then sat down beside her.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“Thinking,” he said. “Wondering. I wonder if we were right to come, what we should do now. Go on, of course, and try to find the Old Ones. But after that, what? And what if we don't find the Old Ones? Will we still go on, stumbling from adventure to adventure, simply going on for the sake of going, for the sake of new things found? A course like that could get us killed. We've been lucky so far.”

“We'll be all right,” she said. “You've never felt this way before. We will find the Old Ones, and Gib will give them the ax, and everything will work out the way it should.”

“We're a long way from home,” he said, “and maybe no way back. Or at least no easy way. For myself I don't mind so much. I never had a home except the university, and that wasn't really home. A university is never more than a stopping place. Although for Oliver, I suppose it might be. He lived up in the rafters of the library and had been there for years. But Gib had his marsh, and Hal and Coon had their hollow tree. Even Sniveley had his mine and metal-working shop. And you …”

“I had no home,” she said, “after my foster parents died. It makes no difference to me now where I am.”

“It was a thing of impulse,” he said, “a sort of harebrained plan that rose out of nothing. I had been interested in the Old Ones—perhaps no more than an academic interest, but somehow it seemed very real. I can't tell you why. I don't know where their attraction lies. I had studied their language, or what purported to be their language. No one, in fact, seemed sure there were such things as Old Ones. Then I ran across the manuscript in which an ancient traveler …”

“And you had to go and see,” said Mary. “I can't see there's so much wrong with that.”

“Nothing wrong with it if only myself were involved. If only the Hermit hadn't died and left the ax in Gib's keeping, if Gib had not saved me from the wolves, if Hal hadn't been a woodsman and a friend of Gib's, if Sniveley had not forged the magic sword—if these things hadn't happened, none of this would be happening now.…”

“But it did happen,” said Mary, “and no matter about the rest of it, it brought the two of us together. You have no right to shoulder guilt because there is no guilt, and when you try to conjure it up and carry it, you're doing nothing more than belittle the rest of us. There are none of us here against our will. There are none of us who have regrets.”

“Sniveley.”

“You mean his complaining. That is just his way. That's the way he lives.” She laid her head against his shoulder. “Forget it, Mark,” she said. “We'll go on and find the Old Ones, and it will be all right in the end. We may even find my parents or some trace of them.”

“There's been no trace of them so far,” he said. “We should have asked at the castle, but there were so many other things that we never even asked. I blame myself for that. I should have thought to ask.”

“I did ask,” said Mary. “I asked that dirty little creature with the foxy face.”

“And?”

“They stopped at the castle. They stayed for several days to rest. There were Hellhounds all about, there always were Hellhounds hanging around the castle, but they didn't bother them. Think of it, Mark, they walked in peace through the Blasted Plain, they walked in peace through packs of Hellhounds. They're somewhere up ahead, and that is another reason for us to go on.”

“You hadn't mentioned that you asked.”

“As you said, there were so many other things.”

“They walked in peace,” said Cornwall. “They must be wonderful. What is there about them—Mary, how well do you remember them?”

“Hardly at all,” she said. “Just beauty—beauty for my mother, beauty and comfort. Her face I can remember just a little. A glow with a face imprinted on it. My father, I can't remember him. I love them, of course, but I can't remember why I do. Just the beauty and the comfort, that is all.”

“And now you're here,” said Cornwall. “A long march behind you, a long march ahead. Food almost gone and one garment to your name.”

“I'm where I want to be,” she said. She lifted her head, and he cupped her face in his two hands and kissed her tenderly.

“The horn of the unicorn worked,” he said. “Oliver, damn his hide, was right.”

“You thought of that?” she asked.

“Yes, I did think of that. You still have the horn. How about mislaying it or losing it or something?”

She settled down against him. “We'll see,” she said in a happy voice.

34

They stumbled on the Old Ones when they were deep into the mountains. Climbing a sharp ridge that lay between two valleys, they came face to face with them as they reached the crest. Both parties stopped in astonishment and stood facing one another, not more than three hundred feet apart. The little band of Old Ones appeared to be a hunting party. They were short, squat men clothed in furs and carrying stone-tipped spears. Most of them wore grizzled beards, although there were a couple of striplings still innocent of whiskers. There were, altogether, not more than a dozen of them.

In the rear of the band two men shouldered a pole, on which was slung a carcass that appeared disturbingly human.

For a moment no one spoke, then Cornwall said, “Well, we have finally found them. I was beginning to doubt in the last few days that there were any Old Ones.”

“You are sure?” asked Hal. “How can you be sure? No one knows what the Old Ones are. That has worried me all along—what were we looking for?”

“There were hints in the accounts written by ancient travelers,” said Cornwall. “Never anything specific. No eyewitness accounts, you understand, just hearsay. Very secondhand. No solid evidence. Just horrific little hints that the Old Ones were, in some horrible way, humanoid. Humanoid, but overlaid with abundant myth content. Even the man, whoever he might have been, who wrote the Old Ones' vocabulary and grammar had nothing to say of the Old Ones themselves. He may have, and that part of his manuscript may have been lost or stolen or for some reason suppressed by some fuddy-duddy churchman centuries ago. I suspected they might be human, but I couldn't be sure. That ax Gib carries smells of human fashioning. Who other than a human could work stone so beautifully.”

“Now that we've found them,” said Sniveley, “what do we do about them? Does Gib just go rushing down and give the ax to them? If I were you, Gib, I would hesitate to do that. I don't like the looks of the game they carry.”

“I'll go down and talk to them,” said Cornwall. “Everyone stand fast. No sudden motions, please. We don't want to frighten them away.”

“Somehow,” said Sniveley, “they don't look nearly as frightened as I would like them to.”

“I'll cover you,” said Hal. “If they act hostile, don't try to be a hero.”

Cornwall unbuckled his sword belt and handed it and the sword to Mary.

“We're dead right now,” wailed Sniveley. “They'll gnaw our bones by nightfall.”

Cornwall lifted his hands, with the palms extended outward, and began pacing slowly down the slope.

“We come in peace,” he shouted in the language of the Old Ones, hoping as he spoke the words that his pronunciation was acceptable. “No fighting. No killing.”

They waited, watching closely as he moved toward them. The two who were carrying the carcass dropped it and moved up with the others.

They made no response to the words he spoke to them. They stood solid, not stirring. Any facial expressions were hidden behind the grizzled beards. They had as yet made no manacing gesture with the spears, but that, he knew, could come at any minute and there'd be nothing to forewarn him.

Six feet away from them he stopped and let his arms fall to his side.

“We look for you,” he said. “We bring a gift for you.”

They said nothing. There was no flicker of expression in their eyes. He wondered fleetingly if they understood a word he said.